David Whyte Quotes

#1. But what would that be like
feeling the tide rise
out of the numbness inside

David Whyte

#2. To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.

David Whyte

#3. There are millions of people living Thoreau's life of quiet desperation, and they do not have the language to escape from that desperation.

David Whyte

#4. One small thing
I've learned these years,
how to be alone,
and at the edge of aloneness
how to be found by the world.

David Whyte

#5. Poetry is language against which you have no defenses.

David Whyte

#6. There are many tough conversations, but one of the most difficult is between a parent and an adolescent daughter, partly because as a parent we are almost always attempting to relate to someone who is no longer there.

David Whyte

#7. The greatest tragedy is to live out someone else's life thinking it was your own.

David Whyte

#8. We're moving toward the kind of work world which has less security. But we hope it has more creativity and possibility of real engagement.

David Whyte

#9. What if the world is holding its breath -
waiting for you to take the place that only you can fill?

David Whyte

#10. Some things cannot be spoken or discovered until we have been stuck, incapacitated, or blown off course for awhile. Plain sailing is pleasant, but you are not going to explore many unknown realms that way.

David Whyte

#11. Start close in,
don't take
the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don't want to take.

David Whyte

#12. You'll always love the person, if you're sensible. But you get a lot of people, especially in divorces and separations, doing a lot of damage to themselves, because they can't figure out that they actually still love this person, but not in their original way.

David Whyte

#13. Therefore, at any time of life, follow your own questions; don't mistake other people's questions for your own.

David Whyte

#14. Gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us.

David Whyte

#15. Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone.

David Whyte

#16. To remember the other world in this world is to live in your true inheritance.

David Whyte

#17. We shape our self
to fit this world
and by the world
are shaped again

David Whyte

#18. When I recite poems onstage, I put myself into the very personal struggle and it grants tremendous perspective. At the same time you get another perspective on the poem you're reciting.

David Whyte

#19. The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance...

David Whyte

#20. I want to know
if you know
how to melt into that fierce heat of living
falling toward
the center of your longing.

David Whyte

#21. Art is the act of triggering deep memories of what it means to be fully human.

David Whyte

#22. Poetry is a street fighter. It has sharp elbows. It can look after itself. Poetry can't be used for manipulation; it's why you never see good poetry in advertising.

David Whyte

#23. To forge an untouchable, invulnerable identity is actually a sign of retreat from this world; of weakness, a sign of fear rather than strength, and betrays a strange misunderstandin g of an abiding, foundational and necessary reality: that untouched, we disappear.

David Whyte

#24. The courageous conversation is the one you don't want to have.

David Whyte

#25. We speak continually of saving time, but time in its richness is most often lost to us when we are busy without relief.

David Whyte

#26. In the poetic tradition, the heart's affections are indeed holy, and if organizations are asking for people's hearts and minds, they are asking in a way for their holy and hidden affections at the same time.

David Whyte

#27. Our work is to make ourselves visible in the world. This is the soul's individual journey, and the soul would much rather fail at its own life than succeed at someone else's.

David Whyte

#28. It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life.

David Whyte

#29. Stop trying to change reality by eliminating complexity.

David Whyte

#30. There is no house like the house of belonging.

David Whyte

#31. The outlaw is the radical, the one close to the roots of existence. The one who refuses to forget their humanity and, in remembering, helps everyone else remember, too.

David Whyte

#32. Honesty lies in understanding our close and necessary relationship with not wanting to hear the truth.

David Whyte

#33. Honesty is reached through the doorway of grief and loss.

David Whyte

#34. The true signature and perhaps even the miracle of human love is helplessness, and all the more miraculous because it is a helplessness which we wittingly or unwittingly choose; in our love of a child, a partner, a work, or a road we have to take against the odds.

David Whyte

#35. There is a lovely root to the word humiliation - from the latin word humus, meaning soil or ground. When we are humiliated, we are in effect returning to the ground of our being.

David Whyte

#36. We withdraw not to disappear, but to find another ground from which to see; a solid ground from which to step, and from which to speak again, in a different way, a clear, rested, embodied voice we begin to remember again as our own.

David Whyte

#37. The greatest luxury of having money should be not having to worry about it.

David Whyte

#38. Sincere regret may be a faculty for paying attention to the future, for sensing a new tide where we missed a previous one, for experiencing timelessness with a grandchild where we neglected a boy of our own.

David Whyte

#39. For the personality, bankruptcy or failure may be a disaster. For the soul, it may be grist for its strangely joyful mill, and a condition it has been secretly engineering for years.

David Whyte

#40. Poetry is often the art of overhearing yourself say things you didn't know you knew. It is a learned skill to force yourself to articulate your life, your present world or your possibilities for the future.

David Whyte

#41. Read and admire, but then go back to first principles and ask the question yourself, in your own way. Dare to disagree.

David Whyte

#42. Genius is becoming something you were all along.

David Whyte

#43. The frail, vulnerable sounds of which we are capable seem to be essential to a later ability to roar like a lion without scaring everyone to death.

David Whyte

#44. Being a good parent will necessarily break our hearts as we watch a child grow and eventually choose their own way, even through many of the same heartbreaks we have traversed.

David Whyte

#45. There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.

David Whyte

#46. Inside everyone is a great shout of joy waiting to be born.

David Whyte

#47. If in your mind it was possible to take a year's sabbatical from work to reassess your life, what would you do and where would you go?

David Whyte

#48. It is not the thing you fear that you must deal with, it is the mother of the thing you fear. The very thing that has given birth to the nightmare.

David Whyte

#49. The thing about great poetry is we have no defenses against it.

David Whyte

#50. To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.

David Whyte

#51. I have hundreds of poems memorized. Mostly by others, but also my own. I use the poems when I lead retreats for management groups on topics like creating teams, or coming up with a more entrepreneurial system, or creating more excitement.

David Whyte

#52. Heartbreak is how we mature ... There is almost no path a human being can follow that does not lead to heartbreak.

David Whyte

#53. By definition, poetry works with qualities and dynamics that mainstream society is reluctant to face head-on. It's an interesting phenomenon that by necessity, poetry is just below the radar.

David Whyte

#54. One of the great difficulties as you rise up through an organisation is that your prior competencies are exploded and broken apart by the territory you've been promoted into: the field of human identity.

David Whyte

#55. Wanting soul life without the dark, warming intelligence of personal doubt is like expecting an egg without the brooding heat of the mother hen.

David Whyte

#56. What we strive for
in perfection
is not what turns us
into the lit angel
we desire
what disturbs
and then nourishes
has everything
we need.

David Whyte

#57. To regret fully is to appreciate how high the stakes are in even the average human life; fully experienced, it turns our eyes, attentive and alert, to a future possibly lived better than our past.

David Whyte

#58. Questions that have no right to go away are those that have to do with the person we are about to become; they are conversations that will happen with or without our conscious participation.

David Whyte

#59. It might be liberating to think of human life as informed by losses and disappearances as much as by gifted appearances, allowing a more present participation and witness to the difficulty of living.

David Whyte

#60. Poetry for me has been a long pilgrimage, a journey and a growing relationship with the unknown.

David Whyte

#61. A good poem brims with reflected beauty and even a bracing, beautiful ugliness. At the center of our lives, in the midst of the busyness and the forgetting, is a story that makes sense when everything extraneous has been taken away.

David Whyte

#62. A sure sign of a soul-based workplace is excitement, enthusiasm, real passion; not manufactured passion, but real involvement. And there's very little fear.

David Whyte

#63. But then we always knew heaven would be a desperate place. Everything you desired coming in one fearful moment to greet you.

David Whyte

#64. Regret is a short, evocative and achingly beautiful word: an elegy to lost possibilities even in its brief annunciation.

David Whyte

#65. The lost sense that we play out our lives as part of a greater story

David Whyte

#66. Shyness means you are in the hallway of a greater presence. You just don't know how to take the conversation another step. It's a lovely indication.

David Whyte

#67. Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.

David Whyte

#68. What you can plan is too small for you to live. What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

David Whyte

#69. The marvelous thing about a good question is that it shapes our identity as much by the asking as it does by the answering.

David Whyte

#70. Lion sounds that have not grown from the mouse may exude naked power ... but cannot convey any wisdom or understanding ... The initial steps on the path to courageous speech then are the first tentative steps into the parts of us that cannot speak.

David Whyte

#71. Sometimes everything has to be inscribed across the heavens so you can find the one line already written inside you.

David Whyte

#72. Silence is like a cradle holding our endeavors and our will; a silent spaciousness sustains us in our work and at the same time connects us to larger worlds that, in the busyness of our daily struggle to achieve, we have not yet investigated. Silence is the soul's break for freedom.

David Whyte

#73. A soul-based workplace asks things of me that I didn't even know I had. It's constantly telling me that I belong to something large in the world.

David Whyte

#74. The art form has to do with the mystery and the hidden invitation that's in the room. And that's when the magic happens, that's when the deep silence emerges to the surprise of all the attentively listening ears. In a way, you're following that silence. You go where the silence is deepest.

David Whyte

#75. To have a firm persuasion in our work - to feel that what we do is right for ourselves and good for the world at exactly the same time - is one of the great triumphs of human existence.

David Whyte

#76. We learn, grow and become compassionate and generous as much through exile as homecoming, as much through loss as gain, as much through giving things away as in receiving what we believe to be our due.

David Whyte

#77. The ultimate lesson is that there is no immunity, no matter our age or the size of our retirement account, from going through constant cycles of integration and disintegration in which we are humbled and hopefully set to rights with the world again.

David Whyte

#78. No matter the self-conceited importance of our labors we are all compost for worlds we cannot yet imagine.

David Whyte

#79. A real conversation always contains an invitation. You are inviting another person to reveal herself or himself to you, to tell you who they are or what they want.

David Whyte

#80. Absent the edge, we drown in numbness.

David Whyte

#81. Stop trying to change reality by attempting to eliminate complexity.

David Whyte

#82. It is difficult to be creative and enthusiastic about anything for which we do not feel affection.

David Whyte

#83. See, even if you're stuck in life, if you can describe just exactly the way you're stuck, then you will immediately recognise that you can't go on that way anymore. So, just saying precisely, writing precisely how you're stuck, or how you're alienated, opens up a door of freedom for you.

David Whyte

#84. Work and life are not separate things and therefore cannot be balanced against each other except to create further trouble.

David Whyte

#85. The severest test of work today, is not of our strategies, but of our imaginations and identities.

David Whyte

#86. The tragedy with velocity as the answer to complexity is that, after awhile, you cannot see or comprehend anything that is not traveling at the same speed you are. And you actually start to feel disturbed by people who have a sense of restfulness to their existence.

David Whyte

#87. And how we are all preparing for that abrupt waking, and that calling, and that moment we have to say yes, except it will not come so grandly, so Biblically, but more subtly and intimately in the face of the one you know you have to love

David Whyte

#88. What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence.

David Whyte

#89. The antidote to exhaustion isn't rest.
It's wholeheartedness.

David Whyte

#90. You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds Except the one in which you belong.

David Whyte

#91. To seek out beauty in our work is to make a pilgrimage of our labors, to understand that the consummation of work lies not only in what we have done, but who we have become while accomplishing the task.

David Whyte

#92. What we love in other human beings is the hoped-for satisfaction of our desire, we do not love them for their desire. If what we loved in them was their desire, then we should love them as our self. When

David Whyte

#93. Honesty is grounded in humility and indeed in humiliation, and in admitting exactly where we are powerless.

David Whyte

#94. Vulnerability is not a weakness but a faculty for understanding.

David Whyte

#95. Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. Pay attention to everything in the world as if it's alive. Realize everything has its own discrete existence outside your story. By doing this, you open to gifts and lessons that the world has to give you.

David Whyte

#96. A good poem has its own life. It's like bringing a child into the world. You, the poet, birthed the child, but the child will surprise you continually. I think a work of art has its own aliveness, its own future.

David Whyte

#97. Sometimes you have to make a complete disaster of your life in such an epic way that it will be absolutely clear to you what you've been doing.

David Whyte

#98. When I'm working with German audiences, I will call on my Rilke and Goethe in the original.

David Whyte

#99. We are each a river with a particular abiding character, but we show radically different aspects of our self according to the territory through which we travel.

David Whyte

#100. Jane Austen never did marry. Why doesthat statement call for such reflexive pity? It carries a diferent meaning if we follow it up: Jane Austen never did marry, and therefore she was given the time and perspective to produce books as well-written as those by anyone who ever lived.
-David Whyte

David Whyte